Okay, so we’ve been talking a lot about Pokemon lately, but can you blame us? Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield were announced, and we’re absolutely stoked! Lately, Rachel’s been watching Pokemon the anime series on Netflix, and one of the few (out of 21) seasons that is available is the XYZ season, the end of the characters’ adventures in the Kalos region. I started watching it around the end of the season with the Pokemon League, and found myself really enjoying it.

I stopped watching the anime a while ago. It was something that was hard for me to keep up with but I always wanted to catch up with it. Netflix has the two XY seasons and the one XYZ seasons. So, I binged all three seasons (roughly 45 episodes each) in a little over a week… yeah. But let me tell you, the Kalos region in the anime is an amazing thing. They did a fabulous job with this particular series.

Honestly, I remember much of the Indigo League, the Orange Islands, and some of Johto. I watched a few episodes of Hoenn and Sinnoh here and there, but when Brock left, I lost interest in the anime, haha. However, seeing how fluid the animation of the battles in the Kalos League and the involved plot for the last dozen or so episodes were, I was impressed. I’ll have to catch up with the rest of the Kalos region when I find the time.

Brock, Misty, and Ash were definitely an awesome combination. However, I fell in love with all the characters in XY and XYZ. Professor Sycamore is probably my favorite Pokemon Professor now. He was hardy, good looking, and definitely knew what’s up. Ash no longer felt like a ten-year-old stupidhead. He was actually fairly mature. Clemont and Bonnie had the most adorable brother-sister relationship and both pulled their own weight in the series. It took me a few episodes to get used to Serena, but she was an awesome female lead as well. I honestly have to say, aside from Brock and Misty, I think this is my favorite group.

I think I was a little salty that Misty left the core group for the Hoenn and Sinnoh seasons of the anime. I didn’t really have much against the other female leads, it was just a younger me being annoyed that a character I liked had left. Of course, being a little older, I can appreciate that the characters nowadays each have their own dreams and goals rather than just following Ash around. It’s an important realization of growing up and it’s a bittersweet touch to the end of the seasons. I did enjoy the Kalos group, seeing that the episodes gave them equal time while still pitting Ash as the main character. Having Ash be more of a teen rather than a kid — letting him age up a little with the majority of the folks who first started watching the anime — was a good move as well.

The series as a whole went at a good pace as well. There was Ash’s adventure but there was also something else lurking around. Once the Kalos League was over, that’s when everything went to hell and the plot really happened. From then on, there were about ten or so episodes of non-stop intense action. We were trying to play our Pokemon games for our Three-Type Challenge while watching the show and we ending up putting the games away and just got sucked into the ending.

Honestly, the last few episodes of the Kalos seasons made me wish even more that we got a Pokemon Z game. The anime really expanded on the plot that was shown in the X and Y games — actually, Rachel, did the XY series of the show do the games’ plot line? — and I would have loved being part of a save the world story like Ash was in the anime. The last few episodes were bittersweet as well, showing the characters figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives and telling each other, “See you later!” rather than “Goodbye.”

The plot was more so in XYZ rather than XY. But it was all awesome all the same. The series as a whole had great characters, an awesome adventure, epic Pokemon battles, and Team Rocket… love Team Rocket. If you don’t watch Pokemon that much but wouldn’t mind giving it a try, Kalos is great a series to do so.

Do you still watch the Pokemon anime? Let us know in the comments below! If you like this post, please share it around.

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